The World on a String

In the golden years of the Liberal Party in England, before the First World War, Herbert Asquith was the patrician prime minister and Winston Churchill was an obstreperous young politician. At question time in the House of Commons, Churchill frequently challenged Asquith with provocative statements and awkward questions. After one of these Churchillian assaults, Asquith lamented, “I wish I knew as much about anything as that young man knows about everything.” Reading this eloquent book in which Brian Greene lays out before us his vision of the cosmos, I feel some sympathy for Asquith. Asquith expresses my reaction to the book precisely.

I recommend Greene’s book to any nonexpert reader who wants an up-to-date account of theoretical physics, written in colloquial language that anyone can understand. For the nonex-pert reader, my doubts and hesitations are unimportant. It is not important whether Greene’s picture of the universe will turn out to be technically accurate. The important thing is that his picture is coherent and intelligible and consistent with recent observations. Even if many of the details later turn out to be wrong, the picture is a big step toward understanding. Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague. Greene’s book explains to the nonexpert reader two essential themes of modern science. First it describes the historical path of observation and theory that led from Newton and Galileo in the seventeenth century to Einstein and Stephen Hawking in the twentieth. Then it shows us the style of thinking that led beyond Einstein and Hawking to the fashionable theories of today. The history and the style of thinking are authentic, whether or not the fashionable theories are here to stay.

In his book The Elegant Universe, published in 1999, Greene gave us a more detailed and technical account of string theory, the theory to which his professional life as a physicist has been devoted. The earlier book was remarkably successful in translating the abstruse and abstract ideas of string theory into readable prose. Early in his new book he gives a brief summary of string theory as he expounded it in The Elegant Universe:

…Superstring theory starts off by proposing a new answer to an old question: what are the smallest, indivisible constituents of matter? For many decades, the conventional answer has been that matter is composed of particles—electrons and quarks—that can be modeled as dots that are indivisible and that have no size and no internal structure. Conventional theory claims, and experiments confirm, that these particles combine in various ways to produce protons, neutrons, and the wide variety of atoms and molecules making up everything we’ve ever encountered.

Superstring theory tells a different story. It does not deny the key role played by electrons, quarks, and the other particle species revealed by experiment, but it does claim that these particles are not dots. Instead, according to superstring theory, every particle is …

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